Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  It was a bugger how things stuck in your mind. Don’t be such a fucking girl. You’ll see a lot worse.

  But she never had. She was sure of that.

  Lindsay didn’t need to look at the bioscreen in her palm to see that some of her Royal Marine detachment were up and about on board Actaeon.

  Adrian Bennett was standing at the back of the huddle of officers chatting over their drinks at the wardroom bar, trying to catch the steward’s attention. He was a sergeant. Sergeants, even Extreme Environment Warfare Cadre commandos like Bennett, did not drink in the commissioned officers’ wardroom. The Thetis party had been barred from the other messes to slow the rumor machine, and his discomfort at being on unfamiliar social terrain showed as he shuffled his boots and folded and unfolded his arms.

  Lindsay wanted to rush up and hug him. He was familiar and safe and reliable. He was from her world. Instead, she paused long enough to think what Shan Frankland might have done, and then stepped forward through the braying group of lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, who should have had the plain bloody good manners to clear the service area.

  “Steward,” she said loudly over their heads. The man looked up, startled. She had never used her three gold rings as imperiously before. “Would you get Sergeant Bennett a beer? And one for me please.” No movement from the junior officers at the bar: she stared at one of them, a victim picked at random. “I’d write for you all too, but you’re obviously just finishing your drinks.”

  There was a second’s silence. It took them a while to understand. Then the officers parted as if a downdraft had hit them and left.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the steward. For a brief and glorious moment Lindsay understood what it was to be Shan, to have presence, and it felt good.

  She reached out for the glasses on the mock-mahogany bar and put one in Bennett’s hand. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.”

  “They told us we were restricted to the wardroom and Juliet deck.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself. Get that beer down you.”

  He raised the glass, looking bemused. “Cheers, Boss.”

  The informal title caught her off guard. Bennett didn’t use it when addressing her very often: she was normally ma’am. But he called Shan Frankland Boss all the time, even though she was a civilian and had no authority over him other than the flimsy mandate handed to her by a politician too many years in the past.

  Lindsay responded anyway.

  “Cheers, Ade.” It wasn’t the done thing to address a non-commissioned rank by first name, but she didn’t care. This wasn’t her navy any longer. He was one of seven people in the universe who she could almost regard as a friend. There could have been eight, but she put that idea out of her mind. “I never got the chance to thank you for stopping me getting myself killed.”

  Bennett looked blank. “Not with you, Boss.”

  “You didn’t start a firefight when the wess’har kicked us off Bezer’ej.”

  “Prudence.” It wasn’t a word he normally used. She wondered if he were raising his verbal game to fit better into the wardroom. “No point dying when you can wait and fight another day.”

  “I didn’t think you were bottling out of a fight. Really I didn’t.”

  Bennett just gave her a nervous half smile and busied himself with his beer. “They’d have torn us up for arse-paper anyway,” he said quietly.

  That was one of Shan’s eloquent assessments of threat. Lindsay wondered if that was where Bennett had picked up the phrase; he’d taken a lot of ribbing from the detachment about his obvious affection for Shan. But she doubted it had gone further than a thought. Shan was too focused and too unforgiving to do anything as messy or weakly human as screwing a subordinate.

  No personal discipline. That was Shan’s verdict when she found out Lindsay was unexpectedly pregnant. The comment still hurt.

  “So you’re not immortal, then,” Lindsay said. Bennett’s expression was blank. She tried again. “You haven’t picked up Frankland’s biotech.”

  “None of us have.”

  “They’re not leaving any stone unturned.”

  “I thought as much.” Suddenly his expression wasn’t I’m-a-simple-soldier, the studied lack of political art that he normally wore. Faint lines creased the bridge of his nose. “So you’re coming back to Bezer’ej with us.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I wasn’t told not to tell you, Boss.”

  Shan dropped that sort of oblique information a lot better. But Bennett had made his point, however inelegantly. It was clear he didn’t like keeping things from her, and Lindsay struggled to think of some way to repay that loyalty. He’d answer a direct question from a superior officer.

  “Okay, what return trip to Bezer’ej, Ade?”

  “We’ve been tasked to find a backdoor route back to the surface if the front door approach doesn’t work.”

  “To do what, exactly?”

  “Retrieve samples.”

  “What samples? And if you manage to get down to the surface without being blown to kingdom come, how are you going to get off again?”

  “Haven’t got down to that level of detail yet, and I’m not sure that extracting us features in the CO’s plans.”

  “Let’s talk about the samples. What? Where?”

  “Colony.”

  “Jesus, you can’t just walk into Constantine and ask them for specimens, Ade. You’ll have wess’har all over you like a rash. The colonists don’t want us there either, remember.”

  Bennett said nothing. He looked embarrassed and stared down into his beer. He might have had a modest education, but he was no fool.

  Oh God. He’s trying to tell me something.

  She waited for him to look up again and reveal what he was struggling with, but he just kept his eyes down.

  He said colony, not colonists.

  “Spit it out, Ade.”

  “Exhumation,” he said.

  It was another word she never thought he used. He probably thought it was a kind way to say it.

  There was only one body buried at Constantine; the colonists preferred to leave their dead for consumption by rock-velvets, the slow and beautiful black sheets of plush tissue that lived on carrion. She hadn’t wanted that end for David. Aras had made a stained glass memorial to stand at her son’s grave.

  “I’m sorry, Boss,” said Bennett. “I thought you ought to know.”

  The harder Lindsay tried not to hear, the less she could see of the black and yellow chevrons of a fire escape hatch on which she had fixed her gaze. She couldn’t feel her stomach or legs. What little progress she had made through her grief was now reversed and she was staring over a precipice.

  “Why?” She wasn’t sure if she had actually said the words aloud. “Why dig up my baby? For God’s sake, can’t they—”

  “They’re just checking everyone they can get to who might have been contaminated,” said Bennett kindly. “Honestly, they really haven’t a clue what it is or where they can find it, other than Superintendent Frankland and maybe Aras. Neither of them is going to hand out samples.”

  The chevrons assumed a more normal focus but Lindsay was still fixed on them. She had to control this. She could not fall apart now.

  “They seem convinced about accidental contamination as a vector,” she said. She fell back on dispassionate words to buffer the pain. “Come on. Let’s work this through. What do we know?”

  “Hugel says she called it a plague. And nobody who knows Shan would buy the idea that she’d carry biotech for money.”

  He’d slipped and called her Shan. Lindsay noticed, but she was more preoccupied with replaying the painful memory of the last time she had seen Shan. She’d been screaming at her, demanding to know why she hadn’t used whatever she had to save David, to help. And Shan’s refusal came back to her—measured, detached, the words of a copper giving a relative the bad news.

  I have an infection. It would run riot in the general populat
ion.

  Shan might just have been lying, of course, but Lindsay doubted it. If she had set up anything, she would have also set up a route to hand over the biotech or whatever it was to her masters. She wasn’t a woman who left things to chance. But she was stranded, in exile among aliens. No, she hadn’t planned this.

  Lindsay shook herself out of it. She forced a smile. It hurt so much she thought Bennett might hear her tearing apart inside. “Let’s have another beer, Ade.”

  “I’m so sorry. I really am. It’s sick. We could refuse, Boss, really we could.”

  “No, we’ll do it,” she said. The pain fell away: the shivering ice in her gut was starting to feel like a comfort, a beacon. “We’ll do more than that. We’ll actually find whatever this is. And when we do, we won’t be handing it over to any corporation. This isn’t a recreational drug. This is a weapon.”

  Bennett hadn’t finished his beer. He liked his beer, she knew, so he wasn’t enjoying being the bearer of bad news. “Commander Okurt will rip me a new one for telling you.”

  “You leave me to worry about him.” She gave his arm a squeeze, another little familiarity that wasn’t allowed between ranks. He stared at her hand as if it had burned him. “One way or another, he’s letting me in on this.”

  Lindsay managed to maintain her collected façade until she got back to the cabin she shared with the civilian engineer overseeing the construction of the habitat at Jejeno. Natalie Cho wasn’t there. She heaved herself onto her bunk, pulled down the soundproofed shutter, and let go of the sobbing that had been threatening to overwhelm her for the last half hour.

  The cabin was the only available accommodation for a woman, short of putting her in with the female ratings, and they would have liked that even less than she would. Natalie wasn’t all that enthusiastic about sharing either. The two women retreated to the privacy of the sealed bunks if they happened to have downtime that coincided.

  Pulling down the shutter felt like sealing the lid on her own coffin. She put her palm against the bulkhead to reassure herself that it wasn’t pressing down on her, and the aftershock of Ade Bennett’s revelation struck her yet again. They were so desperate for this bloody biotech that they would even dig up her son’s body, just in case. They would dig him up without even telling her. Her baby.

  Lindsay tried to stifle the sobs. But nobody could hear her behind that shutter anyway. She wondered whether Shan wept in private too, or whether her police duties had numbed her emotions so much that she had no tears left for anyone, even behind closed doors. Lindsay could picture her in any number of situations; but she could never conjure up an image of Shan grieving or consumed by fear or even overwhelmed by love.

  And that was what she would have to emulate. She would have to be Shan, and put aside normal humanity, and just get the job done.

  A switch had been thrown somewhere inside Lindsay. The biotech had at first seemed wonderful, capable of being harnessed for its medical benefits. Then it had quickly grown into a commodity she resented pursuing; and now it had emerged as a monstrous threat that made men and women—normal people—abandon all decency.

  The wess’har seemed to be able to take breathtaking technology in their stride without taking Pandora’s box, upending it, and shaking every last woe and demon out of it. She’d hoped humanity might have grown up too, but it hadn’t.

  It was a weapon, a costly privilege, a bringer of social chaos. It was everything Shan had said it was. Lindsay understood why Shan wouldn’t hand it over, not even for a child’s life. It didn’t lessen the grief or the pain one bit, but she finally understood that it was the only choice the woman had.

  Lindsay wondered whether Shan had agonized over the decision or acted without a single flicker of emotion. It didn’t matter. Lindsay almost sympathized now.

  But that didn’t matter either. It simply meant that now—even more than ever—she had to kill and destroy Shan Frankland.

  The construction of the biosphere at Jejeno had given Eddie a break from endless shots of isenj buildings. News Desk had really liked the urban dystopia theme because it was alien: alien was big at the moment, apparently. The viewing figures were at an all-time high. Nobody cared why as long as they stayed that way.

  He let the bee-cam wander round the construction site getting charming shots of isenj laborers and suited humans working together to lay foundations. He wondered how many isenj had been displaced to create this free space in a city where space was the scarcest resource.

  “Several thousand,” said Serrimissani, translating the bubbling and chittering of an isenj worker. “And all happy to move, because humans will be valuable friends.”

  Move where? Eddie mentally conjured up the shot of Umeh from the orbital station and could recall only a few patches on the planet that looked unpopulated. They were deserts and ice plains. But then isenj were as physically adaptable as cockroaches—

  He wished he hadn’t thought that, not in those terms. Not cockroaches. It was biologically true and ethically unacceptable.

  “Can I talk to the site foreman about materials?” he said, and shook himself out of his liberal guilt. He ambushed a civilian steering a loader laden with bales of translucent green rope at a sedate pace along a path where the foundations had already set hard. “Hey, is this the plumbing?”

  The bee-cam danced attendance round the driver’s head. She was making a valiant effort not to look directly at it. “It’s the deckhead,” she said, bobbing her head slightly as if dodging imaginary bullets. “The roof. We web the lines across the framework and apply some chemical and current, and bang, it spreads out in a film and seals the dome.”

  “When’s that due to happen? Can I get some shots of that?”

  The driver pointed towards a man in a vivid orange coverall. “Ask the foreman,” she said. Then she leaned a little further towards him. “Look, this biotech thing that woman’s carrying. Is it true that it makes you live forever?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Eddie replied, rather too fast. “And if it did, the likes of us wouldn’t be able to afford it, would we?”

  “Yeah,” said the driver. But her expression said that she thought it might be worth saving up for.

  Eddie shook off the dull burn in his gut that mention of Shan’s little refinements always seemed to give him lately. It was one more weight on the scale of burdensome knowledge that was disturbing his sleep: he hadn’t yet mentioned Here-ward to Lindsay. If she knew about it, then she hadn’t traded information with him as they’d both agreed they would. But if she hadn’t known about Rayat, then it was possible that she might have been out of the loop completely. He’d give her the benefit of the doubt for the time being.

  Eddie concentrated on being busy. A full schedule of filming for the next few days always made him feel purposeful and alive. Not that he cared if News Desk thought he was slacking, of course. Boy Editor was no longer pressing him on biotech stories: Eddie had heard that there were people who really, really wanted knowledge of it to stay off the air until they had managed to secure it for themselves. Time was when nobody, not even governments, could get away with leaning on BBChan. Times had obviously changed.

  He cadged a lift back to the back to the grounded shuttle and sweet-talked the pilot into letting him have a comms channel to watch the news. His news.

  “You see your own material when you edit it,” she said, as if she were going to put up a verbal fight. “Why’d you want to see it broadcast as well?”

  “It’s more real when it’s broadcast.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I want to see if they’ve hacked it about.”

  She considered him carefully. “Okay.”

  Eddie tended to lose track of Earth time zones even though he had several clock displays set on the editing screen he carried with him. He unrolled it to check: he was early for the evening European bulletin. The pilot made a “wow” noise at the sight of the near obsolete tech and peered at it as if it were a valuable antique, which�
�when he finally got home—it probably would be, if it hadn’t had PROPERTY OF BBCHAN coded into every component.

  Eddie caught the tail end of a call-in debate instead. A man in a suit (and they never changed with time, he noted) was being interrupted by an angry taxpayer.

  “They’re going to overrun us,” said the caller, his irate face framed in an insert in the corner of the screen. “You’ve seen the reports on the news. Just take a look at what their own planet’s like. And you’re letting them land here?”

  “I can assure you—” the suit began, but he was shouted down by the studio audience. Global comms or not, nothing could equal the collective anger of humans in the same room within sniffing range of each other’s pheromones. Eddie was glad to see that some old TV formulas had survived. The interviewer struggled to restore some sort of order, but even with the bee-mikes in the studio silenced, Eddie could still pick up the clamor of voices. The trails for upcoming shows were already running in the icon slot on the screen.

  “I think they were talking about our generous hosts,” said the pilot.

  “I think you’re right,” said Eddie. “I don’t need to see the news now, thanks.”

  He rolled up his screen and slipped it into his pocket. He was experiencing the first few seconds after a car crash, when something had been done that could not be undone, however much it wasn’t your fault, and however strongly you willed time to run back.

  “Window,” he said, and the pilot looked at him as if he were mad.

  7

  This isn’t an issue solely for the European and Sinostates governments. Who consulted the people of the Pacific Rim, or the Americas, or Africa when the invitation was made to the isenj? In exchange for the bauble of instant communications over stellar distances, one arrogant alliance may have handed over the Earth. They attempt to shame us into silence by accusing us of xenophobia: but sometimes you have to say, “My people come first, and I will not apologize for that.”